Our synagogue had a virtual showing of the movie Stay Woke, a documentary made in 2016 about the Black Lives Matter movement. Many in our congregation are much more fervent in their leftism than in their Judaism, and everyone else had only positive things to say afterward about the film and about Black Lives Matter.
The documentary depicted BLM in a very positive light Those who spoke for BLM were very energized by the movement. Critics were depicted as unfair and embedded in Fox News.
In the discussion that we had afterward, I pointed out that the movie did not include even one specific proposal or policy change. I did not mention Martin Gurri, but I was thinking about him.
Other congregants pointed out how sad they were that nothing seemed to have changed between 2016 and 2020. One person typed into the Zoom chat that things had gotten worse.
No one else saw a connection between the absence of policy ideas in the movie and the absence of any change. But it strikes me that is you aren’t behind a program, that makes it unlikely that you will effect change.
Continuing to channel Gurri, I would say that social media is not a tool suited to creating a movement. Instead, it is suited to instigating a mob. A movement requires thought and long-term planning. A mob just requires stimulating rage and the narcissistic satisfaction that comes these days from appearing in viral videos and having one’s tweets widely circulated.
Mobs tend to seek scapegoats, such as Fox News personalities. But another scapegoat in the movie was Reverend Al Sharpton. He was canceled by the younger activists, not for his past anti-Semitism, but because he spoke against rioting.
I can see why so many organizations want to support BLM. People who are sad about the deaths of young black men inspire sympathy. But there is also the more cynical reason that when a mob is coming for scapegoats, it’s natural to try and seek shelter.
Mike Gonzalez sees BLM as organized Marxists. But I think that protests that emerge from social media are more child-like than that. The “leaders” are more like Andy Warhol leaders, enjoying their 15 minutes of fame on Twitter or CNN, but not providing what leaders provide. They do not “speak to the troops,” articulate clear goals, formulate a strategy for achieving those goals, assign tasks, etc.
Recently, I was asked what I thought were the most successful movements of the 21st century. I came up with the gay marriage movement, which preceded the emergence of social media. That movement achieved something tangible. As far as I can tell, BLM has only exacerbated the bad relationships between police and young black men, with adverse consequences. There are potential solutions out there, but BLM is instead part of the problem.
Stuff like this scares me about raising my kids in the church. Interesting that this can happen without Christian theology.
There are “specific-ish” policy proposals, but I don’t think its the kind of thing that is being written down in law. For instance, my company donated money to BLM groups, made some policy changes based on DIE recommendations, and stepped up its affirmative action. My County government decided to scrap its admission test to magnet school to increase minority enrollment (reduce Asian enrollment), paid for critical race theory teaching in the school system, replaced Columbus Day, tore down some statues, and is doing something or other involving restructuring the police (my town may lose its force and be absorbed into the county force and this has something to do with racism). My old county government had a lot of Section 8 targeted integration efforts.
Granted that none of these were or will be “on the ballot”, but they are specific actions authority figures did take. The goal of Woke is to “get management to take our side”, not put a bunch of things up for a vote.
I think we should HOPE that BLM doesn’t get more specific. To the extent that it has policy proposals, they are terrible. My company also had Kendi come and talk. Obviously, he has specific policy proposals. I can understand why Jews wouldn’t want to be restricted to no more than 2% of all high status positions like he proposes.
One good sign is that BLM lost a lot of popularity this summer.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/16/support-for-black-lives-matter-has-decreased-since-june-but-remains-strong-among-black-americans/
But the only thing that really matters is how popular it is with management.
“gay marriage movement”
The Great Awokening came on the heels of Obergerfell. I think they are linked. It was a sign that the degenerates were going to be in charge going forward. If gay culture is going to be mainstream, why not thug culture. Both are marked by extreme narcissism, self destructive behavior, and a disdain for the nuclear family. Suing all those bakers for not bending the knee was also a good sign of the beginnings of cancel culture.
Geez, your town sounds awful – I hope this is California?
Having bureaucrats able to take these kinds of actions without much consequence really burns me to the core. Especially when it involves education for gifted kids.
This is pretty much how it is everywhere in the US where you have relatively large administrative bodies.
I live in a town and surrounding area where a majority of resident voted Trump in 2016, though our county government did not.
I don’t think it’s that different in other places. MikeDC is right, the same people run things everywhere.
“If gay culture is going to be mainstream, why not thug culture. Both are marked by extreme narcissism, self destructive behavior, and a disdain for the nuclear family.”
I was with you until the last paragraph. Now I’m against you.
Wow – that is actually the worst analogy that I’ve seen in awhile. Jeez, even I’m offended. @asdf should show us the data (which doesn’t exist) or send an apology.
The data gay dysfunction? Check out any STD statistics, drug use, etc. My company paid for their STD drugs so I’m used to it. I think a few minutes with Google ought to be enough.
Sorry for being obtuse…
Recap: you equated gay culture with thug culture.
To get there, you’re going to have to focus on the metrics that are most likely to generate negative societal externalities…
1) GDP generated by the gay community vs. that of the thug community?
2) labor force participation among gays vs. that of thugs?
3) out-of-wedlock rate for gays vs. that of thugs?
4) welfare usage among gays vs. the baby mamas of thugs
Please provide that data.
1) I assume its higher because the gay community is lighter skinned than the thug community.
I’m not convinced of the relevance of this question. Is being favorable to thug GDP a relevant metric.
2) Same as above.
3) Gays produce virtually no children, so I imagine their out of wedlock birth rate is low.
If we assume that gays would bequeath average genetic potential to the next generation if they did breed, I think it’s fair to say that far below replacement fertility is a kind of “free riding” negative externality.
An no, there isn’t much evidence they are just being super uncles or something.
4) As above, I don’t know how welfare usage of gays compares to underclass black criminals. I do know that gays use SKY HIGH levels of medical care in order to treat the consequences of their lifestyle (primarily STDs and drugs). AIDS meds ain’t cheap. Sovaldi was $120,000 a dose. Not to mention the specialist visits.
A lot of this ends up on Medicare and Medicaid, and when it does end up on a Commercial insurance plan its just another externalized cost to the group rate.
Of course all of this misses the point entirely.
The question is “does the homosexual community and gay marriage movement generally promote pro or anti social behavior”. I think that it promotes anti-social behavior, because gays act in anti social ways and the movement promotes many of those behaviors (just go to a pride parade).
Similarly, BLM and black ghetto culture promote anti-social behavior both in the fact that those communities behave in anti-social ways (the burned down city centers ought to be a hint) and promote anti-social behavior (just look at a list of BLM talking points).
@asdf
Just apologize and move on instead of digging a deeper hole for yourself. We all make mistakes and errors. You can find several of mine on this blog, but my position here isn’t one of them.
Thank you for mentioning the lack of any policy proposals or “action steps.”
“Drive like your kids live here” is relatively easy to take direction from. It seems to me that “Black Lives Matter” is strategically vague.
By the way… “Black Lives Matter” is in a custom made banner in school colors along with some school mottos in front of the middle school I went to (Twelve Corners Middle School). It’s a high volume intersection.
For What It’s Worth, I live in 14618, which is probably the most Jewish zip code in New York State west of the Hudson. Socio-economic percentile (compound or synthetic number) of my zip code was 88% last time I checked.
Getting back to the general point…
– = – = – = – =
In fact, the 7 statement signs in rainbow colors
Black Lives Matter
Women’s Rights are Human Rights
No Person is Illegal
Science is Real
Water is Life
Kindness is Everything
Love is Love
Are all lacking in implied action steps. None of those seven statements implies any particular response to take. I have concluded that is not a bug but a feature.
= – = – = – =
Jesus Christ told his listeners that “By your fruits shall you know them.” This is another promising line of analysis.
I don’t pay careful attention, but it seems like having a large Black Lives Matter movement following a problematic death at the hands of the police is sometimes followed by either rioting, or an alarming spike in the homicide rate, or both. This may be “overdetermined” as the neo-Marxists would say, and correctly.
= – = – = – =
Another line of analysis is this.
https://lawliberty.org/holding-voters-accountable/
Essay Title: “The grim logic of urban politics” by John O. McGinnis dated 6 August 2020.
Partial Summary of McGinnis article, off the top of my head. In most elections people vote to affirm their self-image as good people, rather than with a cold eyed examination of the consequences. Often this doesn’t seem to matter, because major outbreaks of disorder in the USA are somewhere rare, and appear to arise from a combination of circumstances.
(For example this summer’s events since the death of George Floyd may result from a combination of factors such as the Lockdown, liberal hatred of the Trump Administration, Twitter and smart phones for self-organizing crowds, and the fecklessness and caution of municipal leadership (mayors, police, prosecutors).”
= – = – = – = – = end of my ad hoc summary of McGinnis = – = – = – =
As a disclaimer, I don’t mean to trivialize complaints about policing, or the frustration of some Black Americans who think they are poorly served by public institutions and see few obvious actions to improve the situation. The Black Lives Matter sign in school colors I described above is in front of one of the best middle schools in upstate New York. Some of the worst performing schools are in the City of Rochester, which is contiguous to my suburb.
And in fact, some people in the city can bus into my suburb and go to that middle school under the “Urban – Suburban Program,” which my suburb joined more than 40 years ago.
I apologize for the digressions in this post. So many things to discuss!
Black Lives Matter – More Affirmative Action
Women’s Rights are Human Rights – Ditto but for women, kangaroo title IX courts
No Person is Illegal – Open borders either official or de facto
Science is Real – COVID lockdowns forever, rule by mandarins whether they have scientific evidence or not
Water is Life – Some kind of green new deal bullshit coming your way
Kindness is Everything – anything less then our platform means you are a mean piece of shit
Love is Love – globohomo forever, sue that baker
Dude, this isn’t hard. There are a ton of specific things suggested by this sign.
Shouldn’t “Science is Real” include something about global warming?
In our church, in suburban Indiana, we did not have that movie but, in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s death we had two pastors from the inner city come and talk in a sort of panel format. One was very fiery in condemning policing and “racism” while the other was more moderate.
Unfortunately, this was during COVID and so there were no conversations immediately afterward, but when I did have time to catch up with people it absolutely amazed me at how little suburban people know about the American inner city. There is this idea that police violence is a major cause of death or devastation among young black Americans. In the inner-city I lived in in Indianapolis, I would have said the much bigger problem was police NEGLECT and lack of rule of law. Then again, I am white and largely law-abiding.
The issue I have with BLM and this entire movement is the absolute lack of dialogue and investigations of fact. Does anyone know of the work of Roland Fryer? Can you even tell me how many homicides of black people are committed by police in the United States every year? Do you understand that the Portland Police is entirely independent from and has no way to be held accountable for the actions of the Minneanapolis Police?
While the 7 statement sign is uncontroversial, I refuse to support BLM because I believe that they deflect attention and resources away from the very real, but polically unadvantageous, problems of the inner city. Perhaps I am being ungenerous, but I truly believe that they willingly dupe and use both liberal suburbanites and people of the inner city for their own gain.
“Does anyone know of the work of Roland Fryer?”
For those that don’t, here is a recent op-ed from Roland in the WSJ (link should be ungated):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-data-say-about-police-11592845959?st=5dbd4rb1ssjpvlu&reflink=article_copyURL_share
Interesting how it seems to a bit different from the abstract of the paper itself:
“This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On nonlethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than 50 percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force—officer-involved shootings—we find no racial differences either in the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of whom have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.”
So, like I think most people would presume, there is some evidence that there may be some discrimination, probably primarily due to “utility maximization” (a presumption of a greater risk on the part of the officer if the suspect is black).
I should add, this doesn’t mean that our society and our police departments shouldn’t be very attentive to the problem of racism, they should. However, a movement that is based on anecdote instead of fact is probably not one that is serious about improving the lives of the people.
For the lowest levels of force, once all other (measurable, not the same thing as total) variables have been controlled for, blacks are 20% more likely to receive the lowest level of force such as being pushed up against a wall.
For the highest levels of force (tasering, paper spray, lethal force) blacks are less likely.
Is this why we burned down our cities?
My takeaways (which are probably too simplistic) from studies like these:
1) the use of lethal or non-lethal force by the police is *extremely* rare. Way way way out in the tail type stuff.
2) if it is indeed extremely rare, why is so much time, intellectual firepower and angst spent analyzing and discussing this stuff? It really isn’t that interesting actually in the grand scheme of things. I mean no more interesting than being struck by lightning or getting carjacked.
3) why the incessant need to lump brown with black? Are the experiences of the two really that similar?
No, but black Americans are 12-13 percent (about an eighth) of the population and holding steady. Hispanics are another 17-18% and growing, and including Asians and others gets you to about 3/8. In a two-party democracy, 1/8 gets nothing but 3/8 and growing gets attention. So if you’re advocating for race-based policies (which I don’t recommend), conflating “brown” with “black” makes the case seem stronger.
OTOH, in my limited experience many Asians can’t stand black people. I suspect their interests actually diverge. Black people have the numbers, but I’d bet on the Asians anyway.
Uhh, how can you have realistic policy proposals, and “articulate clear goals, formulate a strategy for achieving those goals, assign tasks, etc.” for a fictitious problem, that is the idea that blacks are subject to pervasive unjust discrimination in police enforcement?
I think that there does need to police reform, though none of the reforms I’d like to see are racially-centered:
– End police unions’ ability to protect bad cops.
– End qualified immunity.
– Create a nationwide database to ensure that bad cops can’t get rehired in another department.
– Reign in the regulatory state.
Over-policing is the inevitable result of the growing government intervention into every aspect of life. Was stopping the sale of loose cigarettes worth Eric Garner’s life? Before deciding that there “oughta be a law,” we need to ask whether killing potential lawbreakers is worth the intended goal.
– Eliminate Police Disclosure Laws (PDLs)
PDLs prohibit releasing information about an officer’s alleged misconduct until after internal investigations are finished.
– End Civil Asset Forfeiture
Civil asset forfeiture gives police officers incentives to confiscate money, cars, houses, and other goods from people – especially from poor people who (1) disproportionately deal in cash and (2) cannot afford to hire lawyers to get their property back.
– End the “War on Drugs”
Young people who were denied a good education by the public-school monopolies and who were denied jobs the market sector by minimum wage laws and unnecessary regulations have an incentive to find work in unregulated, illegal markets.
– Reign in “predatory cities” such as Chicago, Detroit, Ferguson, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, which use their police departments as profit centers.
Uggh…another libertarian wish list that won’t move the needle other than make you all feel good about yourselves.
E.g. end qualified immunity now!!!!
Please solve for the post reform equilibrium. What does it look like? What are the upsides vs. downsides?
Anyone who has thought it through for more than 1 min knows that it won’t accomplish anything other than to shift funds from insurance companies to the plaintiffs bar.
Some of these reforms were made in Camden New Jersey with, reportedly, good results.
No.
Camden, NJ was a tiny impoverished black city in NJ which had a majority black police department with black leadership and black politicians which paid its officers 183k/year.
The money for these inflated compensation packages came from the state (the impoverished blacks they patrolled couldn’t afford that) which is to say white taxpayers.
After the housing crisis budgets got tight and they had to reduce police presence which made their already bad crime situation worse because less cops on the beat.
The governor, Trump clone Chris Christie, told them he wasn’t going to keep providing state money for inflated sinecures for black cops in Camden. The Camden PD was dissolved and the County (white controlled) took over. Many of the old black cops got hired back but at around 100k in compensation, and the money saved from that was used to pay white county cops to come in and do the job the black cops wouldn’t do. The imposition of white cops from a white run PD dramatically improved the crime situation, though Camden would will be considered a very high crime area by any metric.
They didn’t get rid of the drug war. They didn’t reduce policing. They didn’t increase the number of black cops.
They did bust up yet another corrupt black government jobs program, but that doesn’t strike me as what BLM is railing about.
They also eliminated the police union.
And replaced it with the County Police Union.
https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/police-and-fire/articles/police-union-president-criticizes-camden-councilwoman-s-actions-during-stop
@Richard Fulmer: No, they only disbanded the Camden City union. The old county-level-only cops were represented by the NJFOP, and they were still represented by it when integrated into the new regional whole-county department. The old Camden-City cops who had re-applied and were re-hired for similar jobs with the new department went briefly without a union, but only *four* months after the new county department took over all responsibility for policing Camden city, the senior officers voted to be represented by the NJFOP union, and a month later, all the other county police officers. The police there have been fully unionized for the last seven years, so, in the end, it was just a short break in unionization and hitting the “reset” button on one of the nation’s most corrupt, do-nothing, featherbedding machine-politics “jobs for the boys” programs and replacing it with actual policing. That is, it was literally the opposite of abolishing policing or even reducing policing, it was a success borne of doing competent policing where none was being done, and those competent police have unions and all the usual protections and benefits too. In other words, it’s the textbook case study for the triumph of common sense regarding these matters, in reality, if not in the minds of idealogues clinging to fantasies.
“They also eliminated the police union.”
Not really…just shifted it to a different police union.
You libertarians keep thinking that there are bunches upon bunches of low hanging fruit hanging out there just waiting to be picked. Still waiting to hear something that will actually move the needle in some way.
Well, I’ve actually got a solution for you that is almost guaranteed to work every single time regardless of race. It’s simple, cheap and doesn’t require complex analytics: STOP RESISTING ARREST.
Yes be a good citizen and comply with orders issued by government employees. The penalty for noncompliance is death.
@Moo cow
[tone down the rhetoric, particularly between now and the election–ed.]
@Moo cow
No, use common sense and allow the matter to get adjudicated where cooler heads can prevail. Not super complicated.
@ed. Ok, apologies. Does this work?
From my link:
Ngo was not available for comment but Kunkel defended the steps he – and the other officers – took Saturday night.
First Ward Councilwoman Shaneka Boucher recorded the encounter and filed her own complaint – later saying that the incident failed to adhere to the positive community policing practices, which the department is known for.
Boucher declined to comment.
“If she felt the officer was not doing something that was right there’s an outlet for that to be properly handled,” Kunkel said. “If an off-duty police officer showed up at a stop and tried to use his authority to interfere with a stop, we would be held accountable for that. She’s an elected official, there’s a way to carry yourself.”
An internal affairs investigation surrounding Saturday’ police stop is currently underway, a county spokesman said earlier this week.
—–
So the lefts big success story involves a white police department that shows clear success being badgered by some councilwoman with an ax to grind and the police union defending its highly successful members and noting that they already have proper avenues to pursue complaints.
And we also have studies showing that these existing procedures for police oversight basically work, that situations where they don’t usually get resolved at a higher level, and that politics and outrage never help the situation on the ground.
Like every other damn thing in society, we have reached the null hypothesis local maximum for outcomes barring a complete re-assessment of sacred cows.
[tone down the rhetoric, particularly between now and the election–ed.]
As penance, I will henceforth end all of my comments with “I’m Hans Gruber and I approve this message.”
BTW – does anyone remember me from my Nakatomi Plaza days? Life was much simpler back then.
“Do you really think you have a chance against us mister cowboy?”
“ Yippee Ki Yay…”
https://youtu.be/r75T8Wa_0Ss
Rehabilitation after that tumble from Nakatomi Towers must have been tough!
Our institutions are not able to fairly handle cases of persecutorial abuse of systems of accountability and transparency. Various forms of immunity (including academic tenure, life appointments for federal judges, absolute immunity for prosecutors) exist to insulate certain individuals from the undue influence of being pressured by predictably unfair and prejudicial proceedings. Qualified immunity is the attempt by the courts to recognize this reality in the case of law enforcement and to thread the needle.
Those who want to get rid of qualified immunity should explain why anybody else should get any immunity or insulation from such risks of unfairness and corrupting or chilling influences. Or for those who enjoy tenure, perhaps embrace a little “you first” unilateral exposure to the vulnerability to prove their consistency.
It is notable that a lot of the same libertarians that hate qualified immunity love talking about how much better it is to have judges, city clerks, etc not be chosen by election or otherwise be subject to “politics”. But those professions are professionals and cops are…
Pure class warfare?
Sorry, but I just have to say: The word is “rein”, not “reign”.
Maybe he actually thinks the administrative state needs a king?
When I reign, the word will be “reign,” dammit.
I see it more as a cultural movement vs. a policy movement (for now).
Redefining what is acceptable vs. unacceptable to discuss in polite conversation is probably more important and robust than any narrow policy proposal. So far, I’d say they have been pretty successful, at least by the reaction of your congregation and many others.
But, don’t worry, the policy proposals will come in due course and they will have nothing to do with incremental reforms that might actually change things for the better. Re-watch the democratic primary debates for a sneak peek. Hint: “it’s time to have a conversation about reparations.”
And this probably shouldn’t be overlooked either:
“Indeed, one reason for this summer’s mania over whites supposedly oppressing blacks is because blacks vaguely realize that the white man’s days are numbered due to immigration. Once the immigrants take over, nobody will take seriously anymore African-Americans’ sad stories about George Floyd, redlining, and Emmett Till. So blacks had better guilt-trip whites fast into making expensive concessions because the next rulers of America sure aren’t going to fall for black tears.”
https://www.takimag.com/article/666666666-immigrants/print
I would also say that the movement has a fair amount of revanchism and populism associated with it.
That deep sense of bitterness, hatred and retribution that seems to define the movement and the ability to vent such beliefs is perhaps more important than mundane topics like policies.
In any event, given the high degree of revanchism, don’t expect any policy responses that don’t also include a similar degree of bitterness and score settling however irrational that might be.
In other words, it ain’t about policy or police brutality or anything like that. It’s about something different entirely.
Paging Robin Hanson, please pickup a white courtesy telephone.
Indeed, you don’t go straight to policy. You control the FRAME of the social interaction. One you do that, the policies just fall out of the frame.
If you talk about the policies first, you risk someone rejecting your frame, because they don’t yet understand that once the frame is in place the policy is a done deal. Gotta wait till its too late for them to do anything about it.
Occupy Wall Street died out without effect in 2011. CHAZ ran out of food almost immediately. I don’t get the feeling that the left has a frame that leads to a relatively-coherent program; it seems much more like they have complaints without solutions and usually even without the understanding that solutions don’t magically appear when you complain.
“left has a frame that leads to a relatively-coherent program”
The left doesn’t have solutions, but they do have policies. Kangaroo title ix courts are a policy version of #MeToo. Getting rid of admissions test to magnet schools is a policy response to disparate impact. Since the 2015 BLM riots Baltimore has instituted lots of policies in response.
None of these solved the problem and many policies were incoherent, but that is a different matter.
Much broader in scope than gay marriage and occurring over a longer timeframe would be all the various feminist victories going back to female suffrage, the pill, abortion, affirmative action, TitleIX, and so forth, and continuing to the present day with board gender quota requirements. The recent hagiographies of Justice Ginsburg tend to focus on her role in several important cases in this regards.
What many of those cases share in common with gay-marriage, however – I mean, besides mostly being forced down the throats of unwilling democratic majorities by kritarchs like Justice Ginsburg – is that the discrimination was intentional and explicit as required by formal law. The ‘reform’ in the name of egalitarian absolutism was thus obvious, “eliminate the discriminatory legal provision and distinction”. Are women not eligible to serve on submarines? Then allow everyone to serve on submarines. Are gays not permitted to marry each other? Then allow gays to marry.
So the discrimination and disparate treatment was perfectly factual, and the mechanism of its reversal was common-sensical.
Ah, but with BLM it’s very different, where the alleged root cause is hypothetical, unfalsifiable, and mythological.
That’s because all the laws have been at least race-agnostic and textually colorblind everywhere for at least half a century, and most places since at least the Civil War. Not only that, but most of the obvious or practicable intentional and pretextual circumventions for law enforcement have been assiduously rooted out by vigorously supervisory federal courts and commissions, reaching gradually but inexorably into ever more tenuous and marginal areas and unintentionally or even subconscious possibilities.
Which means besides (1) just stop enforcing the law via policing, or (2) imposing simple racial quotas for criminal justice actions up and down the line (Unconstitutional, but that’s up to our judge-rulers), there *aren’t* any obvious reform or correction to be made to root out the disparate outcomes, because the root cause isn’t the law or law enforcement. This is the ideological equivalent of “the immovable object meets the unstoppable force” paradox. In this case, “The intolerable reforms meets the intolerable outcomes.”
So the only possibility left is a seeming cognitive dissonance and empty virtue signalling, in which people are very passionately (and publicly, conspicuously) against bad outcomes, but not only don’t know what to do about it, they don’t feel any particular intellectual need to have *any* ideas about what ought to be done, except more expression of solidarity with prestigious opinion in the frustration and disapproval of the stubbornly persistent state of affairs.
In general, a problem which can’t be solved is more politically useful than a problem which can be, so long as people hold the line on the unprincipled exception, and don’t go completely insane and wreck important social systems by trying to do something about it.
Way back in 2015 BLM teamed up with or had an offshoot called Campaign Zero https://www.joincampaignzero.org/ that has some good bullet points and is working to pass legislation, but BLM is more the public face/feel good org and it got corrupted by the the ActBlue professional activists/income stream for Democrats. And now a lot of the BLM rallys are corrupted by ANTIFA agitators.
Perhaps it has to do with problems that are effectively discrete vs continuous? Or perhaps that discrete measurements are being used on a continuous problem? If your goal is gay marriage, then you just have to knock the problem down in, say around 50 discrete jurisdictions. Then for almost all purposes, you have succeeded in getting gay marriage., even if there is some reason that some gay couples cannot marry (say, they can’t get married in a particular church, or they are cousins). If your goal is “no black person is ever killed just for being black”, the relationship between “black and dead” and ‘just for being black” makes the problem that even one case is a failure to meet your goal, and that it all depends upon how you measure that “just for” category. Not to mention that you have 44 million African-Americans in the US, so you will have thousands of potential deaths daily which will satisfy one of the criterion (“black and dead”), even with no police involved. Given the foregoing it doesn’t seem surprising that we continue to have more riots and demonstrations due to the continuous nature of the “just for being black’ measurement. Was Brianna Taylor killed for being black or for being in the middle of an unnecessary SWAT operation? If an African-American man shoots himself with police in attendance, was he indirectly killed by the police presence.
On some level, there needs to be trust between us enough so that we can honestly evaluate the continuous measurement elements.
BLM is a business operation. Nothing more, nothing less. Probably a lot like United Way or the Clinton Foundation.
Popular as it is to take this view of movements, while there are always some grifters, I think it’s usually false and important to acknowledge that, for better or worse, most people in them are true-believers or in it for something other than money.
I think what’s worse is that the line between true believer and grifter is a lot muddier and thinner than we would like. Many grifters are true believers, in fact true believers make great grifters.
Robert L. Trivers work on “self-deception” is still a good place to start.
When you take the individual brain’s talent for self-deception and add to it social media networks with their power to promote virtue signaling and “purity spirals,” what we see around us makes more sense.
I think a good way to remain tethered to reality is to keep looking at incentives. Why are people doing what they are doing? What do my suburban neighbors get out of putting Black Lives Matter signs on their lawn? Etc.
Keep asking the question. What’s in it for hte people who are doing this? It’s not the same for everyone–(1) many idealists are putting in time and energy for free, and they feel important and get excitement and a feeling of group belonging. (2) Some people are cashing in by running seminars. (3) Some people are trying to extract concessions from an institution. (4) Some in authority are following tactics that they think will prevent the sudden termination of their current career. (5) Some people are expressing genuine anger and frustration.
The list could be extended.
The leftists in the good doctor’s synagogue remind one of the liberals in revolutionary Russia as described by the most excellent Gary Saul Morton:
“A quote attributed to Lenin—“When we are ready to kill the capitalists, they will sell us the rope”—would have been more accurately rendered as: “They will buy us the rope and hire us to use it on them.” True to their word, when the Bolsheviks gained control, their organ of terror, the Cheka, “liquidated” members of all opposing parties, beginning with the Kadets. Why didn’t the liberals and businessmen see it coming?
[… …]
Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies. Lenin, after all, was by no means the only bloodthirsty Russian radical.
[… …]
And yet the liberals refused to use their position in the Duma to make constitutionalism work. They would not participate in determining the government budget but confined their activities to denouncing the government and defending terrorists. Even when Pyotr Stolypin, the most capable chief minister Nicholas II ever had, offered to enact the entire Kadet program, the Kadets refused to cooperate. Evidently their professed beliefs were less important than their emotional identification with radicalism, of whatever sort.
[… …]
Though some liberals recognized their differences from the radicals, most acted like intelligentsia wannabes who were unwilling to acknowledge, even to themselves, that their values were essentially different. Socialized to regard anything conservative as reprehensible—and still worse, as a social faux pas—they contrived ways to justify radical intolerance and violence as forced, understandable, and noble. They had to, since the fundamental emotional premise of liberalism—hostility to those ignorant, bigoted, morally depraved people on the right—almost always proved more compelling than professed intellectual commitments.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-liberals
But, as so all too frequently enjoined, read the whole thing.
The synagogue leftists have no policies or solutions because such policies would be a form of resistance to the radicals. Trump, Republicans, normie Americans, and the deplorable bourgeoisie are the Great Satan against which all resistance must be directed.
“Good and hard.”
Currently being deeply immersed in Jeffrey Friedman’s exceptionally excellent Power Without Knowledge, it is interesting to consider what the absence of a public consensus about the means of addressing the perceived problem in relation s between young Black men and whites generally. The vast great technocracy sucking us ever deeper into debt has done nothing and, pace Garret Jones, eliminating even more of what little democracy endures cannot reasonably be expected to make any difference.
Rather than science, ennobling art may be an answer. In a footnote Friedman refers to Charles Taylor:
“Taylor acknowledges that “alienation is most severe among groups which have been but marginal in affluent bargaining societies,” such as “blacks in the USA” but this means that his thesis explains too much: those who have been bathed in affluence and those who have been deprived of it are equally alienated by it.”
What could account for this?
The death of ennobling art is my guess.
Friedman writes:
Consider a 14-year-old whose first exposure to a compelling picture of society (at T1) came from The Communist Manifesto, leading her to explore longer works by other critical theorists—all interpreted through a web of beliefs initially shaped in large part by Marx; but who then, at age 18 (T2), happened to read Atlas Shrugged, followed by other libertarian writers (say, as an assignment in a college course). The interpretations of society produced by her web of beliefs at T3, when she is 22, are likely to be very different from those produced at T3 by the web of beliefs of someone who, as a 14-year-old, read Ayn Rand first, leading her to explore other libertarian writers during the next four years, only getting to Marx and other critical theorists at age 18—even if, by the time she was 22, she had read exactly the same list of works as had her counterpart at T3. For the sequence in which these works were encountered would ensure that at each point along the way, the interpretive context in which a given item on the list was read would be cumulatively and radically different between the two people. As Lippmann put it, “In human conduct the smallest initial variation often works out into the most elaborate differences.”
The dystopian schools and the suppression of vital art have consequences in this regard.
On a certain level, this critique is spot on. On rare occasions, social pressure does coalesce into something more focused, and that is far more likely to enact change. There was a moment of moral high ground after George Floyd, and it was dissipated.
But everything wrong with this critique can be found by examining the bizarre claim that Al Sharpton was “canceled”.
But they’ve done more than that: They’ve empowered leftist, meddling bureaucrats, and successfully changed the Overton Window on what can be said in public. To the point where as in the Soviet Union, centrists and rightists are always left wondering where the line is to be drawn between acceptable and unacceptable.
They have also normalized mob violence and violence against property that would not only not have been OK even in the 70s, but which might have led to local martial law in most other periods of time and in most countries. Having been born abroad, I am actually stunned at how much mob violence has been tolerated in the name of this movement. It has certainly raised my doubts about the stability and even desirability of a liberal government without occasional recourse to authoritarian controls.
I’m not an expert on this but I think serious mob violence in the USA is rare enough that it catches a lot of people in authority by surprise when it occurs.
Many of the people in authority think they are doing a good job of maintaining order, when in fact things are calm because actually there normally isn’t a critical mass of persons determined to create disorder.
I think at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Conventions some of the Upper Middle Class had kids who were in the riots, while the working class was more likely to have cop friends or family, and support a vigorous show of force against rioting.
1968 example…
Major editorial: “We saw our kids beat up on national TV.”
Joe Sixpack thinks to himself: “Yes, my son was the one in uniform out there cracking heads while people threw bags of urine at him.”
= – = – = – =
One of the more depressing examinations of anti-riot policy is this. The initial link is to Isegoria, which points to an old article in Cato Journal, a respectable publication.
https://www.isegoria.net/2016/08/brutality-can-terminate-riots-promptly/
= – = – = – =
As I said, I’m not an expert. It would seem that many in authority have erred on the side of “letting things get out of hand” rather than attracting negative attention by “over-reacting.”
Thomas Sowell once noted the binary. Media commentary either says authorities “over-react” and come down too hard, or they “let things get out of hand.”
Over-reacting might promptly end one’s career, result in being out of a job and not getting a pension. If lots of places are over-whelmed by disorder simultaneously, the authorities can hope that they won’t attract negative attention because they were wrong with a whole bunch of people simultaneously, so everyone was wrong together and what happened was just a force of nature that resulted in many cities being overwhelmed.
Apparently Detroit has been calm. We can ask why
The slogans, the vague messaging, the abstract profession of principles (equality, justice, etc.) are the mottes. The policy positions are baileys. The vagaries build the case for universal support, and demonization of opponents (e.g., ‘you don’t think black lives matter? what kind of monster are you?’). Once everyone (or almost everyone) is in, then the movement seamlessly jumps to a bunch of specific policy positions that are often highly controversial, like institutional racial discrimination, McCarthyite norms, defunding police. If you disagree with specific policies, supporters rush back up into the motte and ask, ‘oh, so you don’t think black lives matter?’ Same with feminism and equality. By equating the two, the goal is to convince people that being in favor of equality in the abstract requires them to support specific feminist policies like affirmative action for women or campus kangaroo courts.
In challenging these broad movements, isms, one strategy I’d recommend deploying – if they’re progressives – is ask them how they feel about analgous conservative slogans or movements; ‘family values’ or “all lives matter.’ Imagine a documentary (I’m sure some exist) showing the ‘brave fight by persecuted Christians to protect religious freedom from secularists.’ It might help people learn import lessons like: slogans don’t encapsulate movements, there are lots of messier, more controversial things going on underneath them (anyone who opposes ‘all lives matter’ as a slogan should also understand why many people oppose ‘black lives matter’ as a slogan or movement). Or that the devil is in the details. If they can articulate that they are support families, but that doesn’t entail banning gay marriage or adultery, or religious freedom without supporting prayer in public schools, maybe they can grasp that professing the abstract principles they deploy does not self-evidently lead to the specific policy position or beliefs that actually define their movements.
I think the knowledge they need to oppose the specific policies, namely that disparate outcomes can be due to something other than racism/sexism (conscious or unconscious) has simply been denied to the vast majority of the population. As a result, they can’t construct a good retort when Kendi etc come in and say that disparate impact = racism. There is a reason Vox has to publish hit pieces on people like Murray, if it ever went mainstream the entire “explainer” edifice falls down.
The purpose of the slogans is to eliminate “passive indifference” as a defense in such an environment. Most people don’t want to engage in a debate under terms that make it impossible for them to win, and that’s what debates in the civil rights era are like. As Chris Caldwell said, if we keep having the debate on these terms, we are going to lose every time.
So most people responded with “I’m just going to ignore this.” Not having a debate is the second best equilibrium solution to having a rigged debate.
The purpose of BLM, etc is to remove non-participation (or as Kendi would put it, non-racism) as an option in social life. Put another way, having eliminated “voice” they now also want to eliminate “exit”.
In related news, the president of Princeton University made a denunciation of the university’s persistent racism, which was surely meant to be ceremonial. The Department of Education responded by launching an investigation into violations of the Civil Rights Act by Princeton University, including a threat of legal action to recover Federal funds.
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/09/princeton-department-of-education-investigation-racism
Donald Trump reminds me of the Joker. I seriously disagree with the man’s principles, or perhaps lack thereof, but I have to admit that he’s legitimately funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylwMWpbv5Fk
Footage of Donald Trump
“Donald Trump reminds me of the Joker.”
Often overlooked: the strange orange man is really nothing more than a mirror image of the low brow gutter politics that the Democrats have offered us for decades. Let me know if you need examples.
Yes, hold your nose and I will too, but I’ll take it over the feeble gentleman approach that held the day among the right previously.
American politics has been racing to the bottom since Andrew Jackson. We may yet see the politician who makes Trump look like a serious statesman, although I shudder to think who it might be.
I wonder what Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) is up to these days?
I keep seeing among the young upper middle class brats that make up BLM (and Antifa) seeming similarities with the pre-WWI German youth movement described by Mises. Even to the point that the US future for those college graduates is very much bureaucratization seen in pre-war Germany and not the dynamic society that America used to be for rising youth.
The danger is not so much the current mob, but like the German youth a century ago, the current credentialed “protesters” will become good servants of demigods implementing horrors such as the Final Solution was by those who entered the German bureaucracy.
==================
“Under such conditions the rising generation are driven by the spirit of the pioneer. They are born into a progressing society, and they realize that it is their task to contribute something to the improvement of human affairs. They will change the world, shape it according to their own ideas. They have no time to waste, tomorrow is theirs and they must prepare for the great things that are waiting for them. They do not talk about their being young and about the rights of youth; they act as young people must act. They do not boast about their own “dynamism”; they are dynamic and there is no need for them to emphasize this quality. They do not challenge the older generation with arrogant talk. They want to beat it by their deeds.
But it is quite a different thing under the rising tide of bureaucratization. Government jobs offer no opportunity for the display of personal talents and gifts. Regimentation spells the doom of initiative. The young man has no illusions about his future. He knows what is in store for him. He will get a job with one of the innumerable bureaus, he will be but a cog in a huge machine the working of which is more or less mechanical. The routine of a bureaucratic technique will cripple his mind and tie his hands. He will enjoy security. But this security will be rather of the kind that the convict enjoys within the prison walls. He will never be free to make decisions and to shape his own fate. He will forever be a man taken care of by other people. He will never be a real man relying on his own strength. He shudders at the sight of the huge office buildings in which he will bury himself.
In the decade preceding the First World War Germany, the country most advanced on the path toward bureaucratic regimentation, witnessed the appearance of a phenomenon hitherto unheard of: the youth movement. Turbulent gangs of untidy boys and girls roamed the country, making much noise and shirking their school lessons. In bombastic words they announced the gospel of a golden age. All preceding generations, they emphasized, were simply idiotic; their incapacity has converted the earth into a hell. But the rising generation is no longer willing to endure gerontocracy, the supremacy of impotent and imbecile senility. Henceforth the brilliant youths will rule. They will destroy everything that is old and useless, they will reject all that was dear to their parents, they will substitute new real and substantial values and ideologies for the antiquated and false ones of capitalist and bourgeois civilization, and they will build a new society of giants and supermen.
The inflated verbiage of these adolescents was only a poor disguise for their lack of any ideas and of any definite program. They had nothing to say but this: We are young and therefore chosen; we are ingenious because we are young; we are the carriers of the future; we are the deadly foes of the rotten bourgeois and Philistines. And if somebody was not afraid to ask them what their plans were, they knew only one answer: Our leaders will solve all problems.
It has always been the task of the new generation to provoke changes. But the characteristic feature of the youth movement was that they had neither new ideas nor plans. They called their action the youth movement precisely because they lacked any program which they could use to give a name to their endeavors. In fact they espoused entirely the program of their parents. They did not oppose the trend toward government omnipotence and bureaucratization. Their revolutionary radicalism was nothing but the impudence of the years between boyhood and manhood; it was a phenomenon of a protracted puberty. It was void of any ideological content.
The chiefs of the youth movement were mentally unbalanced neurotics. Many of them were affected by a morbid sexuality, they were either profligate or homosexual. None of them excelled in any field of activity or contributed anything to human progress. Their names are long since forgotten; the only trace they left were some books and poems preaching sexual perversity. But the bulk of their followers were quite different. They had one aim only: to get a job as soon as possible with the government. Those who were not killed in the wars and revolutions are today pedantic and timid bureaucrats in the innumerable offices of the German Zwangswirtschaft. They are obedient and faithful slaves of Hitler. But they will be no less obedient and faithful handy men of Hitler’s successor, whether he is a German nationalist or a puppet of Stalin.
—von Mises, Ludwig (1945). Bureaucracy
But on the upside, the woke protests were “mostly peaceful” tonight…
(Seriously though, my heart goes out to the officers and their families. This is sick and very sad.)
Two Louisville Officers Are Shot After Grand Jury Decision in Breonna Taylor Case Sparks Protests
https://www.wsj.com/articles/breonna-taylor-decision-expected-wednesday-11600880814?st=pc6ikan12cr3c1x&reflink=article_copyURL_share
Sorry, Arnold. Your post didn’t help me to understand what is going on. I know how difficult is to apply abstract ideas –much worst if they are abstract but vague ideas– to understand reality. Unfortunately, social sciences (yes, including economics) give us very little to understand the many types of groups in which people participate and their motivations, including their common objectives (if any) that they may have in their collective actions (again, if any, because not all groups engage in collective actions, they may be interacting accidentally as in any occasional market exchange). Our poor understanding of how groups are formed and structured and how they behave has been forcing comparisons that often are not helpful (on the contrary, they confirm how poor our understanding of the history of most groups is).
To understand BLM requires to start as kids struggling with watches, that is, by taking apart the relevant pieces. In our case, the pieces are the smallest units of collective action. Then we have to figure out how the units interact to generate demands for X from those that they think should provide X to them (I called them the extorted suppliers of X). Finally, we must focus on how the interactions between the two parties (BLM and the extorted suppliers) evolve in the “regular” business of resolving their differences but knowing that both parties may resort to violence to terminate the conflict. Indeed, the final stage is marked also by the alliances that BLM may agree with other organizations, in particular with political parties willing to break down the status quo because we assume that it’s a price BLM will not regret others to pay for them to get X. The effectiveness of BLM in getting X depends, among other things, on their leaders’ ability to minimize the set of extorted suppliers (if all that they wanted were wealth their extorted suppliers would be only a few wealthy people, but they need these wealthy people to finance their crusade for X whose main –perhaps, only– component is political power) and also to minimize the set of alliances (they may feel good to deal only with the Democratic Party, although if they succeeded, later they would have to deal with the D-Party). My analytical framework may look simple but you know how difficult it is to elaborate the successive stages when X is “vague” and the number of the smallest units of collective action is larger than 2.